Some days you just know you should’ve stayed in bed. Those are the days when you look down and realise you have been wearing your knickers inside out all day, which could explain why everything has steadily gone downhill since you spilled your first cup of tea that morning.

Of course, having small children (and a dog) in the house means that your day is always verged on the point of going tits up at any time – from the dog weeing on the carpet because you didn’t let him out in time to your 9-year-old actually losing an entire school bag between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. Add to this the news that your other half is planning to work from home for the day and you should run screaming to your bedroom and pull the covers back over your head.

The other day was a prime example. Burnt toast; Nutella spilled down a freshly-laundered school uniform; small child doing an enormous, time-consuming poo in the toilet when you should’ve left for school five minutes ago; dog running around the house with an unravelled roll of toilet paper dragging behind him; getting lost in the park on a morning run that you have done a thousand times before; new jumper sneaking into the tumble dryer and shrinking; boss calling for an objectives chat just as you need to be at school for pick-up; dinner spectacularly ruined by attention being diverted by an argument with 9-year-old about her homework… Yes, I am talking about some major cataclysmic events here.

I am not naturally one of those people that bounds out of bed with a thrill at the thought of what the day has in store; I am more of a slope gently into the day with a scowl and the speed of a sloth. That probably says more about what I spend my days doing than it does about my personality in general – I tend to be quite a happy person a lot of the time, I like to think.

Therefore, as the January blues are upon us and we are nearing the end of a month of forced, post-Christmas austerity while waiting for payday to roll around again,  I have decided that in order to find my inner child again and embrace the endless possibilities of every day, I need to make a change somewhere.

A good start would be to put my knickers on the right way around tomorrow.